While Democrats are celebrating the Republican pratfall on health care as a short-term victory, they have a long-term problem that could cripple their chances of regaining power: a public perception that they stand for little besides opposing President Trump.

It’s true of adults in general — only 37 percent of respondents to a recent poll said Democrats stand for anything — and it is even bad among Democrats: Twenty-seven percent feel their party mainly stands for being anti-Trump. The Washington Post/ABC News poll also found 52 percent of all adults believe the party’s main characteristic is being against Trump.

Yet as Democrats try to figure out their identity and message, they’re going to have to wrestle with an equally important question: Should they shift strategy to focus on wooing back the working-class white voters who left them for Trump, or on broadening the coalition — people of color, Millennials and progressive whites — that gave President Barack Obama two terms? Or can they do both?

On Monday, Democratic leaders, including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco, will take a first step toward addressing those concerns when they unveil a policy road map — titled “A Better Deal: Better Jobs, Better Wages, Better Future” — for winning back control of Congress next year.

Regardless of what’s in the plan, it will fuel the party’s internal debate over which voters it should spend its time, money and resources trying to attract. The question pokes at deep-rooted, uncomfortable feelings about race and class that America hasn’t resolved, let alone any political party or leader.

UC Hastings law Professor Joan C. Williams, author of the new book “White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America,” said that while she agrees with much of what Phillips says, “it’s not a zero-sum game between going after African Americans and going after the white working class.”

That argument is bolstered by former Obama pollster Cornell Belcher, who saw the repercussions of weak outreach when he recently studied Millennials of color in Florida and Wisconsin who voted for third-party candidates or didn’t vote in 2016 after previously supporting Obama. Many may agree with Democrats on the issues, but feel little party loyalty.

These voters, Belcher wrote in June, “feel neglected and taken for granted by the Democratic Party. Beyond their issues being widely ignored, they also implied that candidates never spoke to them and physically never came to their neighborhoods.”

Phillips fears Democrats will make the same mistake next year. He expects the party and other left-leaning groups to spend $750 million on the 2018 midterm elections and worries that little of it will go toward grassroots organizing in communities of color.

“If all the time, energy and attention is going toward the Trump voters,” said Phillips, a senior fellow at the progressive think tank Center for American Progress, “it fuels and exacerbates the situation where there’s a lack of connection” between Democrats and people of color.

Williams said Democrats — particularly its leaders — have alienated working-class white voters by not addressing stagnating wages. The repercussion on election day: Roughly 1 in 4 working-class voters who chose Obama in 2012 didn’t cast their ballot for Clinton.

“The left professes to care about diversity and level playing fields, but they can barely look class issues in the eye,” Williams writes in her book.

Working-class white voters gravitated to Trump, Williams said, not because of any bold economic policy he was proposing, but because “they finally heard a mainstream American politician saying, ‘You are the forgotten people, and we understand what you want are decent jobs that lead to a solid, middle-class standard of living.’”

“He did say, ‘You are the forgotten people,’ and he also said, ‘It’s these Mexicans who are coming in here and taking your jobs. It’s these Muslims who are coming in here and taking your jobs,’” Phillips said. “That appealed to people on a deeper level in a way than I think people are willing to acknowledge in terms of racism in society.”

Democrats have been sifting through feedback since election day, polling and interviewing Americans in swing districts across the country, trying to diagnose how the party lost its way.

That research, which will start rolling out Monday with the new policy proposals, has led to the conclusion that voters want an economic message and they want it to be simple. While Clinton may have posted scores of economic proposals on her campaign website, researchers found they blurred into background noise, so voters tuned into none of them.

Pelosi and other party leaders believe it’s a false premise that the party has to choose between reaching out to working-class whites or people of color. She believes the Democrats’ new message will cut across demographic and racial lines.

“There’s a lot that the black community, the Hispanic community, the blue-collar community has in common: economic security,” Pelosi told The Chronicle this month. “Instead of separating people out, (the message has to be) about the economic stability of America’s families.”

Pelosi attributed much of the party’s disconnect with voters of all colors to miscommunication, likening it to a relationship that’s gotten off track.

Joe Garofoli is the San Francisco Chronicle’s senior political writer, covering national and state politics. He has worked at The Chronicle since 2000 and in Bay Area journalism since 1992, when he left the Milwaukee Journal. He is the host of “It’s All Political,” The Chronicle’s political podcast. Catch it here: bit.ly/2LSAUjA

He has won numerous awards and covered everything from fashion to the Jeffrey Dahmer serial killings to two Olympic Games to his own vasectomy — which he discussed on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” after being told he couldn’t say the word “balls” on the air. He regularly appears on Bay Area radio and TV talking politics and is available to entertain at bar mitzvahs and First Communions. He is a graduate of Northwestern University and a proud native of Pittsburgh. Go Steelers!